Sofia, Bulgaria-based Eleven Ventures, a venture capital firm that supports early-stage tech companies from Southeast Europe, announced on Monday that it has closed its final ‘Eleven Fund III’ fund at €60M.
The firm’s latest fund is 10 times the size of the previous fund it raised in 2018. It comes just three months after the fund’s first closing, and only three years since the launch of its €6M predecessor.
Ivalyo Simov, a founding partner at Eleven Ventures, believes that achieving ten-fold growth in such a short period demonstrates the firm’s commitment to bringing authentic and genuine value to the table, and how successful they have been in helping companies from SEE conquer global markets.
Investors in this round
The new fund, ‘Eleven Fund III’, is backed by 80 per cent repeat investors, including EIF, and over 60 individuals with deep global networks and entrepreneurial experience.
Ivalyo Simov says, “It is incredible to see that the once early-stage founders, currently running mature businesses, are becoming investors in our fund and now supporting the next generation of up-and-coming entrepreneurs to help them become even more successful. The hope is that, by doing so, every subsequent success will be a bit bigger than the one before. Eventually, it will be a factory for successful growth.”
Eleven Ventures invests in seven startups from the new fund
According to a statement from Eleven Ventures, the tech industry in South-Eastern Europe has seen €2.25B in funding by regional companies in 210 deals over the last 12 months. Eleven Ventures claims to be at the heart of this huge growth and has built a track record of ‘picking winners’ at the earliest stage.
The firm is the first institutional investor in Payhawk, which recently raised $112M at a $570M valuation in November 2021; early backer of Gtmhub, which raised $120M in Series C round in December 2021; and the only VC investor in SMSbump, which was acquired by US e-commerce marketing platform Yotpo in 2020.
With its new fund, Eleven Ventures says that it has already invested in seven new companies, including Frisbo (Ecomtech), ProductLead (Ecomtech) and SuperOkay (Future of Work) from Romania, Biopix (Healthcare) from Greece, and PlanDelta (Future of Work), Metasim (Future of Work) and BeMe (Healthcare) from Bulgaria.
Early-stage VC investing in tech companies in Southeast Europe
Founded in 2012 by Daniel Tomov and Ivaylo Simov, Eleven Ventures was initially the first accelerator in the Southeast Europe region. Tomov and Simov were later joined by Vassil Terziev, a Bulgarian tech entrepreneur. Terziev is a co-founder of Telerik, which was acquired by Progress Software in one of the biggest exits of a software company in the region.
In 2018, Eleven Ventures raised its second Fund, one of the first entirely private VC funds in Eastern Europe, and has since been focused on pre-seed and seed investments.
The firm has made 150 investments over 9 years and supports tech companies in five priority verticals – fintech, healthcare, future of work, future of food, and ecommtech.
In its IPO in March 2020 – the first-ever for a VC fund in the region – Eleven Ventures listed its first fund with over 20 portfolio companies on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange under the Eleven Capital public entity.
Along with several rising stars including Nitropack, eBag, Econic, and Ondo, Eleven Ventures’ portfolio includes the unmanned cargo drone manufacturer and operator Dronamics, the Kanban platform Kanbanize, the online resume builder Enhancv, the telehealth platform Healee, along with Payhawk, SMSbump, and Gtmhub.
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